Every single day of the last miserable decade, the U.S. Military has pissed away more than $16 million in fraudulent contracts in Afghanistan and Iraq. That's $60 billion thrown away on wasteful handouts to Pentagon contractors during the wonderful War On Terror -- $60 billion thrown away without even killing random goat farmers who committed "terror" by being born in an impoverished country that happened to be a good, out-of-the-way place to test robot death planes around the clock. And these numbers come not from some external objective accounting project, but from the U.S. government itself. So, the numbers are obviously lies, and are probably off by several hundred billion dollars. Let's cut Social Security benefits from a program that's fully funded from people's paychecks, because "entitlements" are bankrupting the country!
The Senate's "Commission on Wartime Contracting in Iraq and Afghanistan" also left a little wiggle room in the numbers -- the fraud was somewhere between $31 billion and $60 billion, it concluded. (Guess which end of the guesstimate Fox News chose for its headline.) Eh, send us an update when you're talking about real money. (Haha, and it would be counterproductive for GE to pay taxes when it makes most of its money from making murder machines to sell to the U.S. government.)
Also, according to this commission, the Pentagon has spent $200 billion on private contractors over the course of the first 10 years of the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq. But as the Pentagon itself sees no reason to keep track of anything financial, this number is also meaningless, in that it is certainly a fraction of the actual military spending, even if the number was anywhere close to the truth (which it's not) -- the CIA and NSA and State Department and FBI and probably NYPD operate their own overlapping wars and "intelligence networks," all paid for with your tax dollars.
For example, the watchdog Citizens for Public Integrity just put out a report saying the Pentagon blows through $140 billion per year in payments to military contractors -- that annual number has apparently tripled since the beginning of the Endless Wars, 10 years ago. Let's shut down the Corporation for Public Broadcasting, at once! Because that $420 million annual federal grant is basically a rounding error to the endless billions spent to drop bombs on people all over the world, for freedom. [Center for Public Integrity/Kansas City Star]
